Book Image

Java Fundamentals

By : Gazihan Alankus, Rogério Theodoro de Brito, Basheer Ahamed Fazal, Vinicius Isola, Miles Obare
Book Image

Java Fundamentals

By: Gazihan Alankus, Rogério Theodoro de Brito, Basheer Ahamed Fazal, Vinicius Isola, Miles Obare

Overview of this book

Since its inception, Java has stormed the programming world. Its features and functionalities provide developers with the tools needed to write robust cross-platform applications. Java Fundamentals introduces you to these tools and functionalities that will enable you to create Java programs. The book begins with an introduction to the language, its philosophy, and evolution over time, until the latest release. You'll learn how the javac/java tools work and what Java packages are - the way a Java program is usually organized. Once you are comfortable with this, you'll be introduced to advanced concepts of the language, such as control flow keywords. You'll explore object-oriented programming and the part it plays in making Java what it is. In the concluding chapters, you'll get to grips with classes, typecasting, and interfaces, and understand the use of data structures, arrays, strings, handling exceptions, and creating generics. By the end of this book, you will have learned to write programs, automate tasks, and follow advanced courses on algorithms and data structures or explore more advanced Java courses.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Java Fundamentals
Preface

Interfaces


In Java, you can use interfaces to provide a set of methods that classes must implement for them to be conformant.

Let's take the example of our Person class. We want to define a set of actions that define the behavior of any person, regardless of their age or gender.

A few examples of these actions include sleeping, breathing, and moving/walking. We can place all of these common actions in an interface and let any class that claims to be a person implement them. A class that implements this interface is often referred to as being of the type Person.

In Java, we use the keyword interface to denote that the following block will be an interface. All the methods in an interface are empty and are not implemented. This is because any class that will implement this interface will provide its unique implementation details. Therefore, an interface is essentially a group of methods with no bodies.

Let's create an interface to define the behavior of a person:

public interface PersonBehavior...